izigame.me

The OG battle royale game.

TL;DR: Devs missed the mark for Oceania servers and made it unplayable.

The long version:

I will preface this. I am a full-time worker and a casual gamer. I don't play ranked and I don't get enough hours in a day to practice enough to play in competitive matches. Standard matches for me, always.

I have always liked this game. I bought this game for $20 at the end of the horde-mode games era and it was a nice change with a new, unique gameplay style. I could play solo or with mates and it was always a lot of fun with a lot of laughs. Early Access had a lot of bugs but it was a good experience. I played it for quite some time from when it was in beta right through to 1.0 release and a bit beyond. Every update added something to the game and it was always improving.

Fortnite came along, offering a free-to-play battle royale and people left PUBG in droves. I tried Fortnite and didn't like it. It didn't have the same feeling. PUBG has just always had satisfying gun fights. The footsteps, the distant gunfire, the close-up gunfire. Listening to a shot ring out and identifying what sort of weapon it was and how far away they were, and more importantly, how much of a threat they were to you and your squad. PUBG always looked and sounded GOOD. Even when Apex Legends came along, it never had the same raw combat feeling that PUBG offered.

Times changes, jobs changed, people changed and I stopped playing it for a while.

2022. New job, new friends. We're looking for a game to play. They've never really played battle royale games before and Apex was free-to-play, so we played it for a bit. I still didn't like it and they weren't keen on it either. I then learned that PUBG was also now free-to-play. I was very excited and it was very easy to convince my new friends to get it straight away.

We all loved it. They loved it for the same reasons I enjoyed it all those years ago and I loved it because it had new maps and weapons, and a new levelling system. We played it heaps. Season challenges were fun, cosmetics were good and it was a good time. The normal-mode matchmaking seemed decent enough. For me, who hadn't played it for nearly 4 years and for the newcomers, it was a nice mix of easy bots, other new players and a few veterans that we occasionally got the drop on.

2024, October. We've been playing PUBG on and off for two years. We're ok at it. Not great, not terrible. We get enough victories to keep us wanting to come back to it. And it's always fun.

The game developers release an update (Patch 32.1 https://pubg.com/en/news/7810) which included a server region merge. We're in Australia so we've always been on the Oceania (OC) servers. The new update has merged the OC servers with the Southeast Asia (SEA) servers and it is now all hosted out of a SEA server location. The developer's reasoning for this is:
"As PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS continues to mature and grow, we’ve been looking at the opportunities before us to improve upon the matchmaking experience. As a result, we have decided to merge some of our regions together." -Dev Letter: Region Merge (https://pubg.com/en/news/7676).

We try it out and very quickly realise the PUBG we know and love is not this. We have determined two distinct reasons:
1. The ping. Australia's Internet is hit-and-miss depending on where you're lucky enough to live. On OC servers we would consistently get between 20ms - 50ms ping while playing. Not amazing, but perfectly playable. The first game we played on the newly merged SEA had an average ping of 150ms. The second game we played was around 180ms. It was unplayable. Doors wouldn't open, loot wouldn't appear on the map and the gunfights were atrocious.
2. The matchmaking. The developers claim this change was to improve the matchmaking experience. It has done anything but that. As I stated at the start, I am a casual player. On OC servers, I was mostly matched with other players around my level (Tier 2, level 260ish) and the rest of the match was filled with bots (for better or worse). On the SEA servers, every single player is level capped at Tier 5, level 500 and they are infinitely better at the game than I am. This normally wouldn't worry me as I've come up against the odd max-level player on OC before. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You just change your strategy and deal with it. But couple a match full of max-level players with a terrible ping, and the game becomes utterly unplayable and even less enjoyable.

Since the October region merge update, the developers have released 2 more patches with the most recent one (Patch 33.1 https://pubg.com/en-asia/news/7988) actually rolling back a region merge for America. The rollback was due to poor performance across North and South America. As part of the rollback, the developers stated that while they are rolling back the American server merge, they "will not be rolling back the OC region, and it will remain in its merged state." -Notice Regarding the High Ping Issues After the Region Merge (https://pubg.com/en/news/7865).

The article goes in to detail the reasons behind rolling back the American merge but not the OC one. While I understand their reasoning for it, it doesn't make it any easier for me to accept it. I've played over 1300 hours of this game and have, for the most part, thoroughly enjoyed it. But these recent server changes have rendered the game unplayable and they clearly have no inclination to fix it for the OC region. I only get a few hours every few days to play games and I am not going to waste those precious moments on a game that no longer works properly.

This review is bittersweet as it has reminded me of all the good times I've had in this game, but I feel like I need to state how I currently feel.

Thank you to anyone who makes the time to read this story.